Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3)

by Steven Drachman

  So when I uttered this non-lie, the two cops laughed and drew their pistols and handcuffed me and then asked me to come with them, which was polite and everything, but unnecessary given the cuffing. They did it very discreetly, so that they would not disturb the fancy-fops in the Magnesium Temple, they tossed my jacket around the cuffs and walked arm-in-arm with me out of the Temple as though we were old chums, and then the cop on the left told me that a government agent wished an audience with me, and he said this as though it meant something, didn’t specify which government — city, state, Federal, or even foreign — and I didn’t bother asking, because I’d heard this joke before.

  This was everything I’d wanted to avoid! Crushers aiming .44-40’s at me, the Pavilion Hotel (with all the rich nobs) and the infamous Mr. Sneed, without much doubt the government agent of whom the crushers spoke.

  It was beautiful, though, Mr. Gardner’s Pavilion, a grand Italianate hotel built with local limestone, held aloft by fourteen stone columns; croquet and tennis courts dotted the grounds, and out front, horse-drawn carriages hauled high society into town from New York, France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba.

  Wilfred Munsen, the Otherworld Fabricator, exited a carriage and entered the Pavilion Hotel. It had been a little while since I’d met him so briefly, but I recognized him immediately. He had a briefcase in his left hand, and a newspaper tucked under his right arm. He did not seem to have seen me.

  The cops led me to a two-story piazza; inside, Mr. Sneed, government agent, sat before a dimly glowing fireplace; in the window over his left shoulder, a view of the Mohawk valley glimmered in the morning sun. His short blond hair was thinner than when I had last seen him, and his face was ruddier than before, a tribute to the sauce, and to a life of anger and frustration. He scratched his thick and calloused fingers, and he stood.

  “You are a free man,” he said. “Mr. O’Hugh. A free man, and a rich man.”

  He laughed, and he shook his head.

  “I hate to say it,” Sneed sighed. “A half million dollars.” He turned to the window, and he stared off into the distance. “A half million dollars. Half a million dollars. Five hundred thousand clams.”

  I nodded, and I tried to keep my wits. In my opinion, this was more than likely some kind of scheme.

  “And to what do I owe,” I asked, “this great generosity and sudden sense of fair play?”

  “Hester negotiated the whole thing,” Sneed replied. He turned back to me, and he met my eyes. “She could have kept the whole million, but she gave up half. Suspected you were dead, but just in case.”

  This seemed like something Hester would have done, if J.P. Morgan had offered her a million dollars.

  I raised a finger, and Sneed answered my question before I asked it.

  “She made someone dead and not-dead at the same time,” he explained. “You see? Allen Jerome stole a sack of rocks from Morgan, and he hired you to infiltrate the Sidonians.”

  “Hired me?”

  “Involuntarily.” He raised a hand to silence my objections. “Dirty pool. Hornswoggling. No argument here. We are who we are. We have tools at our disposal. Morgan wants what he wants, and the government needs him happy.”

  He sighed.

  “It is not easy,” he added, “running a country.”

  I stayed silent. He continued.

  “I am telling you the unvarnished truth now, O’Hugh,” Sneed said. “Morgan didn’t care about the sack of rocks. He doesn’t overly care for money. He cared about Sidonian magic tricks, the ability to make a body dead and not-dead simultaneously. Not for himself. For someone he loved.”

  “Someone he loved,” I repeated.

  “Long ago. Just someone he wanted to see again. Sidonians could raise the dead. And that Chinaman blew a big hole in your head in that mining camp, out in the Wyoming mountains, and you were up and about later that day.”

  “Ahah,” I said. “I get the confusion. You see, the Sidonians conjure deadlings. I, on the other hand, shed an essence. We’re all born with twenty-one essences. Most of them we never use.”

  “Well,” Sneed continued, “Hester killed one of Morgan’s essences — his avarice — and she conjured a deadling. Morgan’s first wife, Mimi, whom he held one last time. Maybe more than that. I don’t know. The door was shut and locked. And hence, your money, and your freedom.”

  I nodded. This was all good news. This had nothing to do with Finkelstein’s warning. Munsen’s arrival in Sharon Springs must in fact have been Finkelstein’s secret, for which he had demanded a hundred dollars, and the cops were a red herring, a petty coincidence. I can tell you nothing more about this, about Finkelstein’s relationship with Munsen. Finkelstein is long dead.

  “An Otherworld Fabricator is here,” I said. “His name is Wilfred Munsen. He is dangerous, although he seems unprepossessing, almost a milquetoast. Do you know anything about him?”

  Sneed shook his head.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t even know what an Otherworld Fabricator is. Should I?”

  “Fabricators create Otherworlds,” I said, “which are inscapes, or ‘inner landscapes’ made of dreams. Skimmy assassins — who can kill us, if we don’t pay attention, and who grow stronger every day — they come from these Otherworlds, and the Otherworlds will eventually suffocate the universe that we know. Fabricators are dangerous, and Munsen, who arrived to-day in Sharon Springs, is the most dangerous of them all.”

  Sneed chuckled grimly, and he tapped a pen on his desk.

  “Every time I scratch my ass,” he said, “there’s some new damned crazy thing.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “On the contrary, O’Hugh,” he said, “I would be most foolish to disregard anything you might tell me.” He paused. “So is there anything I can do about this?”

  “Keep an eye open?” I suggested. “Every triumph over them is a defeat in disguise, but perhaps you and I can walk to our doom without misconceptions. I am not optimistic about ultimate victory, but I always keep an open mind, so if you have any ideas, let me know.”

  Sneed promised that he would.

  “And what do I do now?” I asked. “I’ve been running for a long time.” It seemed like forever. When was I last a free man? “A long time,” I muttered.

  “Sure,” Sneed said. “I get it. You need your sea legs. What does a free man do? What does a rich man do? OK! You catch Mr. Morgan’s train to Yuma, Arizona. Or to be more accurate, you ride your horse to Mr. Morgan’s train to a coach to Mr. Morgan’s train to Yuma, Arizona. And from there, you catch a ride to Z’vulun, where Hester awaits.”

  “Yuma,” I said. “That’s where Cleo Chavez got his head chopped off and pickled in a jar?”

  “Big admirer of Cleovara Chavez, are you?”

  “Friend of a friend,” I said.

  Chavez was a confidante of Tiburcio Vasquez, a really crazy outlaw who’d once offered me a job.

  “Well,” Sneed said, “I understand they had the wrong head. It’s unfortunate, since if ever there was a lout who deserved to have his head chopped off and pickled in a jar, it was this lout. But don’t worry; that’s not the way Yumans ordinarily treat visitors.”

  “I catch a ride to Z’vulun, on the other side of the world,” I asked, “from Arizona?” and Sneed wondered aloud if this was really the strangest thing I’d heard to-day. I acknowledged his point, and he made to leave, but at the door, he hesitated.

  “O’Hugh?” he said finally, and I grunted, and he asked me, “Did you know that Hester could conjure a deadling?” and I said I most certainly did, and I emphasized it just like that: certainly, with as much certitude as I could muster.

  “I taught her a thing or two,” I said.

  Sneed expected me to ride a Southern Pacific Railroad train to the village of Yuma in Arizona territory in early 1882, but I had a better idea.

  Chapter 41

  I walked through a door in the extravagantly beautiful Sharon Springs of 1882 and into the extravagantly
crappy Sharon Springs of 1976, where I caught a Greyhound bus to Penn Station in Manhattan, where I caught an Amtrak train to Arizona. As Theera once advised me, no one paid much attention to me; certainly, no one asked me for a ticket. I wasn’t the droid they were looking for.

  I’ve been on trains … and then I’ve BEEN ON TRAINS! which is to say that I once robbed a train, another time I was on a train in a private compartment with a lovely young woman when the boiler blew, and, of course, I’ve jumped from a train more than once. The Amtrak ride across the country from New York to Arizona in 1976 fell somewhere between the two categories. No one exploded across the sky, for example. The food was train food, and the ride itself was actually rather efficient — in my own time, trains chugged along at less than thirty miles per hour, but by 1976, trains could really roar.

  Still, a trip from New York to Yuma took a long time, and every town looked the same. Each one had an “Arby’s” near the train station, and a “Woolworth’s.” In between, a lot of trailers and empty lots, and shirtless flabby boys chasing each other through grassy fields. I finished all my dime novels about halfway in, and after a day my ass hurt. I have seen 1970s train-track America. But from time to time I would strike up a conversation with someone from 1976, which meant that I was talking with someone from “the future,” which is always interesting, and it was nice to roam again.

  After a while I arrived in Yuma, where I stepped off the train in 1976 and onto a Yuma train platform in 1882. I was back in my own time.

  You know 19th-century Yuma from your “moving pictures,” but it was a little different in reality, back then, during the days of the Wild West. Hot as a devil’s sphincter even in the spring, barely shaded by scattered cottonwood trees, cursed with an ocean of mosquitoes from the swampy river, and strewn with scattered and ramshackle adobe shacks with arrow weed roofs, which gave the city the appearance of the playroom of a destructive and distracted child.

  The entrance to the city, a dusty Main Street, wide enough for freight wagons led by twenty mules, was less unruly. It ran all the way to the dock, where steamers ferried travelers back and forth to the mining camps, along a river colored blood red from mud and desert sand. The fort sat across the river in California, and a prison was located on the bluff across from the fort, which fort and prison brought the village the railroad stop in 1877, and which railroad stop, I gather, is what gave this village the moderate level of dingy prosperity that I witnessed in 1882.

  I stepped off the train and dragged my sparse belongings across a Main Street that was ominously deserted for the middle of the day in a village large enough to boast two hotels, five lawyers, three butcher shops, two drug stores, two wheelwright shops and eleven saloons. At the end of Main Street, smoke belched from the steamers in the distance, but they were bypassing the village.

  Something was wrong.

  I heard a familiar voice, a memory from some years ago, a gentleman with whom I had traveled to dinosaur country and, the same day, fought a mob of angry and confused deadlings in Cloud City, Colorado, years ago. My pal, Oscar Wilde.

  “Down here,” he called, nervously yet not without a touch of flamboyant excitement.

  Oscar hid behind a barricade of empty barrels and crates and even a few full sacks of grain, which had been casually piled in front of Welker’s Restaurant and Saloon, and which provided a useful fortification against whatever it was that Oscar might wish to hide from to-day.

  I dropped my bag, drew my pistol, tossed myself over the barrel and landed beside Oscar, his six-foot three-inch body uncomfortably folded into the narrow crawl space, covered with dust but recognizably my old pal.

  “How are you enjoying America?” I asked, and Oscar said, “Great success! Nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. Immense receptions. Wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer.”

  “Until to-day?”

  “The welcome in Yuma,” he admitted, “has been somewhat less than adequate.”

  “I really should have known you were behind all the havoc,” I said, and Oscar laughed and said he couldn’t really manage to stay out of trouble. His light blue eyes were bright and unafraid. I asked him what sort of trouble he’d gotten himself into this time, and Oscar said, “Prison break.”

  I asked him if he had done the prison-breaking, and he said he wished that were the case.

  On this particular day, a riot at the prison distracted from a very subtle and quiet breakout, which the guards discovered only after they had quelled the unrest and accounted for most of the convicts.

  Sheriff Tyner and his deputies soon rounded up a posse to head into the mountains. Even old Sanguinetti volunteered. Indeed, everyone volunteered except women and children, mostly, a bunch of geezers, one gimp and the hopheads in the Palace Restaurant on Main Street, who would have been of meager use anyway, what with the opium in their lungs.

  Oscar himself also quickly offered to ride to the mountains with the other men and to kill villains as needed. However, we are each a man of his respective époque, and poor Oscar would never be unreservedly appreciated during his lifetime, whether he were penning your hilarious “comedies of manners” or volunteering to kill villains.

  It’s because … well, you know why.

  At the time he offered his services as a killer and a villain hunter, Oscar wore the same outfit that he wore the day I saw him again in Yuma: a tight velvet doublet, with large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under the collar, a low-neck white shirt with an enormous collar, light-blue neck scarf, knee breeches, light-colored pantaloons, grey silk stockings, a broad-brimmed hat with pink-dyed ostrich plumes, white-gloves, patent-leather shoes, and a velvet cape, and he clutched an ivory cane, which he did not need. The posse roundly and unanimously rejected his offer, and they left him behind in a mosquito-ridden cloud of dust.

  Of course, as soon as the other able-bodied Yumans left the village to scour the mountains, the escaped cons descended on Yuma. The fort had closed down just the month before, so no soldiers were nearby to witness the havoc, and most of the prison guards were in the mountains with Sheriff Tyner and his posse, which left the gang free to raid H. S. Fitzgerald & Co.’s general store over on 2nd Street for foodstuffs for their journey, more appropriate duds, and whatever horses hadn’t been taken for the foray into the mountains. They also recruited a few of Yuma’s shadier womenfolk, those who might wish to spend their life surviving off hidden gold down in Mexico. (More than you might imagine volunteered, but not enough to avoid feuds and fisticuffs among the outlaws.)

  This left Oscar alone to protect the village.

  “Why is this your concern?” I asked Oscar, and he said that he couldn’t very well leave a gang of escaped convicts and general marauders free, and I said he certainly could.

  “I don’t imagine,” Oscar replied, “that the great Watt O’Hugh could in all conscience leave the village of Yuma to be overrun by outlaws.”

  I wondered what Oscar’s namby-pamby “Aesthetic Movement” had to say about the prospect of getting shot in the street and dying in a pool of bloody mud — which would not present a very visually pleasing tableau — and Oscar explained that nothing about the Aesthetic Movement could be read to justify cowardice and heartlessness.

  “We are at the cusp of a great and beautiful moment in history,” he said. “You have to speak of the life of action, I of the life of art. I wonder what in the heroic paladin’s code of ethics would permit cowardice and heartlessness so alien to the code of the aesthetician.”

  To this, I explained that even a heroic paladin could not be ever heroic, and I had no especial obligation for the people of Yuma.

  “I’m just here to catch a … well, to catch some sort of transport to Z’vulun. I’m only in Yuma to leave Yuma.”

  I furthermore pointed out that a friend of a friend had been beheaded in Yuma, and his head pickled in a jar, and added (an exaggeration, I hope) that I had
been truly and consciously brave and heroic only once in my life, on July 13, 1863, and it had gained me no benefit or pride.

  Oscar asked what the hero of Watt O’Hugh and the Yuma Prison Break would have done, and I said that I warn’t familiar with that particular tome, and Oscar laughed and said, “Not yet. But it will one day be written, and I would gather it ought to contain more than two sentences. Because ‘Prison break in Yuma; Watt ran away’ — this doesn’t make for much of a story.”

  So I sighed and asked him his plan, and Oscar explained, and it didn’t really sound too bad, and if by cooperating with his plan I might escape from behind this barricade, get Oscar to shut his trap and see me on my way to Z’vulun, I figured I ought to cooperate with his plan. If we saved the village and captured a fugitive as well, then all the better.

  Dust drifted across the street on a turgid breeze, and the lantern over the mail depot creaked.

  Bells chimed, somewhere in the village. Church bells? The village clock? I didn’t know.

  The bells quieted. In the general store, someone laughed.

  A couple hopheads peered out the window of the Palace Restaurant, dark purple circles beneath their eyes.

  The hopheads pulled the curtains shut.

  Two young men stood on the roof of Gerson’s store, boots on the eaves, the sun behind them. Their shadow rolled menacingly across Main Street. And across the street, two more men, nearly identical, the sun in their faces, on the roof of the depot. All four men held long, round-barreled rifles. A couple of them laughed. They watched the entrance to our little tunnel, and they waited for us to come out.

  “Their idea was to take over the village entirely,” Oscar said. “Practically a military operation against defenseless civilians. Loot everything and go.” He laughed. “Look at them, just standing there, as though no one would dare to shoot at them.”